The Girls Who Waited
by Sake-kunXx
Summary: Amelia Pond. The girl who waited. But she wasn't the only one. Sally Sparrow. Another fairy-tale name. Another girl left waiting. Maybe they didn't have to wait alone. Femmeslash/Yuri. Rating definitely going to go up. Don't like, don't read.
1. Chapter 1

**The Girls That Waited**

_**Author's Notes: First attempt at femmeslash. There's simply not enough of it for New Who, or in fact in general really. And to be honest, I thought that Sally Sparrow and Amy Pond seem like the perfect pairing. Both are abandoned by the Doctor, and both are unable to see what they have right in front of them. **_

_**Amy and Sally; the girls who waited. That isn't to say they waited alone.**_

_**Disclaimer: So not mine. If they were... *censored thoughts involving corsets and chocolate***_

XxxX

Amelia Pond was the girl who waited.

Twelve years of waiting. Of being looked at like she was crazy by her classmates, and or through the patronising eyes of adults that could never, ever understand, because they just couldn't see over the rigid walls of logic that they entrapped themselves in. They could never dare to believe that anyone could have anything but the boring lives they had resigned themselves to. No, everyone had to be as normal as everybody else, and if anyone had a thought; had so much as a whiff of anything better... well, better to talk them out of it. Anyone with any kind of high-flying thoughts, -quite literally in her case- well, Leadworth just had to go and grab them by the ankles; drag them back to Earth to walk among the people that could no longer even see the possibilities written in the stars. All of them, too busy filling their lives with nothing, wandering through their existence, and never taking the time to just sit back and imagine that maybe there could be something more to life. Never looking at the sky, like she often did and wondering 努hat's out there?"

Twelve years. Twelve years, and four psychiatrists. They were the most persistent in their disbelief, most narrow minded of them all. Her aunt had not been so bothered right at the beginning; she had thought that her niece just had an imaginary friend, like most children did at that age. It was something to keep her amused when Sharon was out, so why worry about it? But as the years passed, the 菟hasedidn't, and she thought that perhaps it would be better to call an adult in to do what the children in school already did on a daily basis- look at her through critical eyes. Tut. Try and hide the pity from their eyes as they patronised her, and told her that it wasn't real.

Amelia had never been one for being told she was wrong. Especially when she knew unequivocally that she was right. She understood the difference between reality and fantasy, and she was aware that from the outside, it seemed like what she said about the magical glowing man with a swimming pool in a library in a box with engines sounded like the latter, but she refused to be told that she was making it up. It wasn't her 努ay of dealing with the move to a new town and it wasn't a lie. She tried to be patient with them, she really did. But she had found that adults were not accustomed to listening to sense, especially from the lips of a child. She tried to explain it to them, spoke slowly and clearly so they wouldn't misunderstand her, but every time her words fell on deaf ears and blank, glazed faces, and her anger got the better of her. Raised voices, a gnash of teeth and a sharp yelp later,and they were walking -and on one, occasion running- out of the door, and her Aunt Sharon was back to searching the Yellow Pages.

There was only one person that even pretended to believe her. A boy called Rory Williams. He had been in her class at school ever since she came to the little town, but they'd never actually talked before. Amy had noticed him looking at her sometimes, but he never made an effort to interact with her, and she ignored him.

But then the bullying started.

She had always had a pretty thick skin when it came to being teased. She had always had to put up with it. Being the Scottish girl in the English village made her an outcast from the beginning, as did her fiery hair and the fact that she had joined the school halfway through the term. But all that she could accept just fine. It was normal, and she could take it.

But no-one, _no-one, w_ould tease her for her Doctor. Her Doctor was something important to her, something that made her feel special. It had been _her_ back garden that he landed in. It had been _her _that he had asked for food from. He had treated her like an equal, even though he was a grown up, and obviously clever, even if he acted silly. He cared about her being afraid of the crack in the wall, and hadn't treated her like it was a stupid thing to be scared of like all the other adults had. He was what Amelia had always thought impossible an adult that acted like a child. Smart and daft. Funny and serious. Reassuring, even when he apparently knew little more about what was hiding in her wall than she did.

If they didn't want to believe that it was possible for a man like that to exist in anything but the mind of the odd child that no-one wanted to talk to, that was fine, but for them to mock him, call her stupid, or else a liar for saying that he existed, and for thinking that he was coming back for her... she wouldn't take that laying down. Amelia Pond always gave as good as she got.

Or at least she would have -and more than likely would have gotten into trouble for it- if not for Rory. He jumped in front of the head bully, standing like a human shield in front of her, a ward against their jibes. He did what no-one else would do and stood up for her.

Of course, Amelia was a little too proud to admit it. At first she yelled at him. She was furious with him for thinking she needed him to save her. She didn't need anyone's help, she had always done fine on her own. She didn't want people thinking that she had to have someone looking after her. Her aunt was never there to look after her at home; she hardly needed anyone to look after her in school. She had started to think that it was weak to rely on others.

Relying on the Doctor didn't count. Relying on the Doctor gave her something to hope for the promise of getting away from the town that had always been too quiet for her. Relying on the Doctor made her stronger than anything else, even if if made her feel a little weak each night that he wasn't there when she looked out, past the little red swing, to the spot where the ruined shed had once stood.

Amelia Pond didn't _need_ anyone's help. She was used to life alone, and in a town full of people who just couldn't see the world like she did, it her own was the best company she could keep. But Rory Williams was a determined boy, and he longed to befriend this girl. He saw the light in her eyes that no-one else had in this town. He might never rise to anything, he would never be strong, but he was passionate about the things that mattered. And he was passionate about having a chance to share a little of that spark for life.

'I _know_ you don't _need_ anyone!' his voice had a tone of desperation and surprise, his face was flushed he hadn't meant to insult her, only to stop the others from tormenting her. To be her saviour, to be like the man that she talked about, who had saving her from the alien eye behind her wall. He couldn't fight aliens, but he would do everything he could to protect her from the things that threatened her here, on Earth, in Leadworth at the very least. He had thought that she would thank him, and her reaction made him panic. He had then suddenly realised how loud he had spoken, face flushing even darker. Looking down at his feet, he carried on, quieter, uncertain. 'I know you don't _need_ anyone... but I thought... maybe you might _like _to have someone... and... I wanted to be your friend...'

Her heated, angry words froze on her lips. For the first time in her life, she fell silent. Chewing the inside of her lip, she looked away, shifting uncomfortably, before hitting him playfully on the arm and smiling at him encouragingly. That was the start of the first true friendship Amelia Pond knew in Leadworth.

He listened to her story about the Raggedy Doctor. Of the blue box that fell out of the sky and destroyed her shed. Of the strange man that sat in her kitchen, made a mess and ate fish custard. The wizard with a magic wand that buzzed and opened up the crack in her wall and stopped her from fearing what was on the other side.

Rory helped her make her own 澱ig blue time machineout of a box his father had that something had been delivered in. They coloured the outside blue, using up all their blue colouring pencils and a tub of poster paint. She had carefully drawn the 撤olice Public Call Boxsign, and asked Rory to pretend to be her Doctor. He had been shouted at for stealing his father's clothes, but it was worth it. There was nothing like her smile. It made him proud when it was him that brought it out. They played with it for days, before he had the idea of trying to put a pool in it.

Cardboard, as they found out, does not like water.

He stood up for her when others laughed at her for her 都illy make-believe and she stood up for him when they teased him for his nose. They made jokes about their tormentors, and suddenly, life in the boring little town... was a little less boring. They talked about everything. The shared all they had to share- every secret, every sweet, every spare moment. They were inseparable.

He was the first to call her Amy, six years after that fateful night, and at first it had almost sent her into another one of her fits of passion. The Doctor had said that he liked her name. He thought it was like something from a fairy tale, and she was proud of having something that he liked. At first she wanted to shout at Rory, argue with him for trying to take that connection away from her.

But she stopped herself. Her aunt had given up trying. There had not been any new psychiatrists lately. People were used to her quirkiness, and she had lost her novelty. She was growing up, whether she liked it or not. She was thirteen. The slight chubbiness of her childhood was leaving her, and she was looking more and more like a young woman. Less and less like the little girl running out in the dead of night in Wellington boots and a nighty.

Amelia Pond would never stop believing. She would never stop waiting. But Amy Pond didn't have a choice about growing up. She knew, deep down, that Rory had never really believed. He listened raptly to her when she talked, and played with her in every game. But to him, it was still just a game. It was the person telling the story, the way she had with words, more than the tales themselves.

Her playmate was growing up, and sooner or later she would have to as well.

So Amy stopped talking about him. She stopped making her toys, stopped asking to play 典he Raggedy Doctor adventures She stopped writing her stories. She stopped drawing her comics. She passed through school, got herself jobs wherever she could. The town breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, the girl from Scotland was being nice, normal. Boring.

They didn't see her pulling back the net curtains every night before bed. They weren't there to see her waking up in the night and running outside, the ghost of a dream about the most beautiful sound in the world.

The sound of hope.

And when Sharon bought a computer and an internet connection ten years after her niece first started talking about a man in a ripped up suit, she had neither the technical knowledge, nor the care to check her search history.

No-one knew that she stayed up until ridiculous-o'clock typing in anything she could think of to try and find answers, to find out if anyone else had ever met the mysterious stranger that had run into her life, but had never run out of her mind.

And, after eleven years, no-one asked Amy Pond why she decided to make a visit to a rare-book shop in London. When she was gone, even though it was only for a few days, only Rory Williams missed her. Only he had seen her shutting down, seen the fading of her spark over the years of hiding her past, only for it to burn, rekindled as she stood in his doorway with a bag over shoulder, a flush of excitement on her cheeks, telling him where she was going, but not why.

He was the only person who wanted to ask her. The only thing holding his tongue was his respect of her rare desire for privacy, and shock from the brief peck on the cheek as she left.

Rory was the only one who waited for her to come back.


	2. Chapter 2

_**Author's Notes: Apologies to anyone watching this story, I've updated this chapter, as there are a lot of sections where my writing it a bit iffy, so I wanted to improve it.**_

The Girls Who Waited- Chapter 2

There was an electronic bleep as Amy opened the door and walked into the little shop. She had been standing outside for a while now, looking between the sign over the door, and the little piece of paper on which she had scribbled down an address. They matched, but still she didn't want to go in. Doubt was filtering in now, as she realised what it was she was about to do. She had spent eleven years thinking that the Doctor was _hers, _and _hers alone. _She knew that he had never been a fiction of her lonely mind, creating a companion for herself in a new town where she did not know anyone, or as a replacement for the Aunt that was never there. Despite everything that people thought, he was no imaginary friend; Amy had always had a vivid imagination, but it wasn't quite _that _good. And she could not physically have done what his box had done to the garden shed, and she had no reason to make that mess in the kitchen. But that didn't stop him from taking on the same kind of qualities as an imaginary friend; he was hers. She had told the story of he raggedy man, and she had let Rory act like him for their amusement, but that night had been _her. _No-one else had experienced it. No-one else knew exactly what he looked like, sounded like, how he acted. No-one else had met her magical friend. He was, to her mind, hers.

But now, after searching the internet, she found that she was just one of many, many people he had met and helped, not to mention what sounded like hundreds of occasions that he had saved the whole planet. Her life had been shaken, the foundations crumbling. She had lived most of her life thinking that she was special, chosen out of everyone else. That conviction had made her the strong person that she had grown up to be. She had been ridiculed for it, but still she had stood by her beliefs no matter what.

But even after this discovery, she could pretend that maybe it was someone else they were talking about someone else. People who posted to the websites claimed that all images had been destroyed by something called the "Bad Wolf Virus", and indeed whenever she found anything promising, the images vanished before the link could finish loading. If she didn't see physical proof that it was actually him, then she could convince herself that it wasn't him. She could have.

If she hadn't come here.

But this, this was something that could completely shatter her memories and her fantasies. She was about to meet someone else whose life had been touched by her Mad Man with a Box. And they had evidence. The guy she had been talking to on the forums, Larry, he said there was something about a DVD, with the Doctor talking away. How many people had seen the DVD? How many other people had seen her Doctor, watched him on the screen and felt as it he was talking directly to them? Could her resolve really withstand this? Someone who had seen something so intimate to her, and what's more, he said he had even met him, though only briefly.

'Can I help you?'

Amy jumped away from the door, and it gently closed behind her. There was a girl standing behind the counter, presumably having come in sometime after Amy had gone through the doorway, since she hadn't been there when Amy walked in. Or at least, she didn't think she had. She hadn't noticed her there... then again, it wasn't like she was very spatially aware at the time... she was too distracted by the sound of her little reality crashing down around her.

The girl was looking at her with politely inquisitive dark eyes. Her dark blonde hair was pulled back in a clip, with most of it hanging down in soft curls around her shoulders. She was perhaps a few years older than her, and though she looked friendly enough, she felt a little uncertain as to how to broach the subject of her Knight in Ripped Pinstripes.

Studying her for a long moment, the girl smiled encouragingly, as if she understood the teenager's silence and her discomfort. 'Wild guess," she said, smile pulling up at one side into a friendly smirk, 'you're not here for the books.'

Amy looked around her, registering for the first time the low shelves surrounding her. They were all elegant; antiquated, several leather-bound and many with the titles printed smartly onto the covers in gold. There were a few titles that she recognised, but many more that she didn't, and a few seemed to be in different languages. She blinked at them for a moment, having completely forgotten that it was, indeed, a book shop that she had come to, and when her gaze once again fixed on the shop girl, they shared a laugh.

'How did you guess?' said Amy jokingly, more at at ease, and she moved away from the door a little 'I dunno if I'm at the right place. I mean, I think I have, I looked up the address, and the shop's the same as he said it was, but...' she was, as she always did when nervous, babbling. Shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, and hitching her backpack more comfortably on her shoulder, she tried for a little coherency "...I'm looking for Lawrence Nightingale? Something about an... Easter egg?'

The girl's smile faltered, then fell completely, eyes rolling with a growl of irritation and a mutter under her breath. Seeming to forget that Amy was there, she turned to a room just visible through a beaded-curtained doorway with an angry hand gesture, as if strangling someone who wasn't there for a few seconds. When she stopped, calming herself with a sigh and a hand coming up to pinch the bridge of her nose, she turned back to the half-scared, half bemused eighteen-year-old before her, plastering a now false smile on her face.

'Sorry about that... have you ever met someone who just seems to find delight in irritating you?' the question seemed rhetorical, as she continued without before the redhead had time to get further than opening her mouth 'I need to make a call... do you wanna come through, and I'll put the kettle on. I was gonna close for lunch anyway,' she manoeuvred out from behind the counter and around Amy, turning the sign hanging on the door so that it said closed and escorting the confused girl into the kitchen through the beaded curtain, which she held aside for with one hand, the other hovering at the base of Amy's back.

Gesturing to a comfortable looking chair, the girl left her at a small wooden table. Covered in ring marks from countless un-coastered cups, most of its surface was taken up by a large television and with an inbuilt DVD player, behind which high windows that filled the room with light. Looking around, she noticed that the walls of one half of the room were covered in shelves full of DVDs and files vying for space. There was another doorway on the other side of the room to the one they had entered through, and the rest of the room was a small perfunctory kitchen – sparse, but well used. This was where the other girl had busied herself, flicking on a kettle and rifling through a cupboard with one hand while holding her mobile to her ear with the other. While waiting for it to be answered, she showed a box of teabags to Amy in a silent askance of if they were okay, and when Amy nodded, she dropped on into each of the two cups she had laid out already, just as Lawrence picked up on the other side of the line.

The conversation was brief; over just as the kettle came to the boil, and not as angry as to be expected from her reaction when Amy had mentioned the man's name. It was more... weary than anything else. Tired. As if whatever he was saying was not unexpected, but a common occurrence, and judging by her worn out acceptances of his apologies, they were something she heard far too often. When she hung up, she looked back at the younger girl, smiling an apology of her own for ignoring her.

'Sorry to tell you, but Larry's out of town for a couple of days. Apparently he's off in Wales, visiting a friend that had a book for him for the shop,' she paused as she poured the hot water into the cups 'Honestly, would it have killed him to tell me he had someone visiting? Sugar?'

With a jolt, Amy realised that the last was directed to her, 'Oh! Um, yes.'

'Milk?'

'A little, please.'

There was a moment of silence, filled only by the tinkling of the teaspoon on the inside of the cups, the slosh of liquid and the sounds of the kettle cooling down. The blonde brought the mugs over, sitting in the chair to the left of Amy and handing her a mug with a smile. Pulling her feet up onto the seat with one arm around her legs and holding the mug over her mouth as she blew to cool it, studying Amy over its rim.

'I'm Sally by the way. Sally Sparrow.'

'Amy Pond.'

'I know what you're thinking, Amy Pond,' Sally said at length.

Amy realised, as she looked up, how long she had been stared at the mug in front of her blankly. She wasn't even certain of her own thoughts anymore, so jumbled as they were. If this girl wanted to shed some light on them, she wasn't going to stop her.

'Oh?'

'You're thinking... that you've come all this way for nothing. The guy who could have given you the answers you're looking for has buggered off somewhere for who knows how long, and you're considering your choices. If you want your answers, you can find somewhere to stay until he comes back, or you can go back home without your answers for now, and maybe come back later. But... judging by the look on your face... you don't know if you want them...'

'How did you...?'

That kind smirk was back, 'Spooky, isn't it?' she said, her eyes widening for dramatic effect.

'I... I thought I wanted to find out. I mean... I've been waiting for eleven years. I've been looking all that time, but now... it's complicated.'

'Tell me about it.'

Their eyes met for a moment, studying each other. Two complete strangers, brought together by each of them meeting, for one tiny moment, a man that had changed their lives. There was curiosity alighting in her eyes, and she settled herself into her seat, ready not just to hear the story which many before her had listened to, but to do something no-one else had ever even tried to do.

She was going to believe. No matter the story, she was ready to believe what Amy had to say.

Her heart rate picked up a little, the same excitement at telling her tale mixing with something she hadn't felt before.

'...What about the shop?'

'It's a quiet day for a quiet shop.' Sally said confidently, wiping away the uncertainty with the vigour with which she said it, eyes fixed on hers. 'If anyone _needs _me, they'll knock. This is more important.'

Biting her lip, Amy mimicked Sally's posture, settling and taking a deep breath. Sally nodded her encouragement, and Amy began her tale.


End file.
